The sum total of my cycling in France was an hour long jaunt around Aniane, so I can’t claim to have real personal experience with French cycling. However I did make a couple of observations:

• Cyclists are treated with much more respect by motorists than they are here in Canada. That means always giving cyclists a wide berth when passing (a few metres wasn’t unusual), always signalling the intention to pass, and not trying to pass if conditions weren’t safe.
• If you wear cycling shorts, shoes, etc. and are “pro” or “semi-pro” then you also wear a helmet. We never saw an amateur “around town” cyclist wearing a helmet.
• Cycling seems much more popular as casual recreation; it was not unusual to be sitting at a remote café and have a gaggle of 10 or 15 cyclists show up, dismount, and grab a coffee before continuing on their way.
• Everyone, pro and amateur, uses hand signals.

I just brought my bike up from the basement this afternoon and I rode it in to the office for the first time after filling up the tires at the Ultramar gas station on the corner.

Read more about cycling on PEI from new cyclist Rob Paterson.

My friend Harold Stephens is getting together with author Robert Davis to launch a Bangkok Restaurant Reviews website. Reviews should start to flow shortly; if you hungry and near Bangkok and looking for sage advice, this will be the place.

La Famourette, the excellent restaurant between Aniane and Gignac has a website. There are lots of pictures that show off its riverside location.

A couple of things I’ve noticed on my Mac of late:

• BBEdit was starting up very, very slowly. I threw the BBEdit Preferences file in the Trash; now BBEdit starts up very, very quickly.
• You can now import Firefox bookmarks into Safari. Perhaps you could always do this? I’m not sure. But it’s as simple as File \| Import Bookmarks and then locating the Firefox bookmarks file.
• So far I’ve had absolutely no troubles post-Tiger upgrade other than a general sluggishness of the system (which seems to be getting better). All of my applications and devices are working as they did pre-upgrade.

I got a ride up to the north shore last night for the Annual General Meeting of the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust from one of my fellow directors. We couldn’t remember which fork in the road to take at Kensington to get us to Sea View the fastest, so he pulled a PEI road map from the side pocket of his car and handed it to me.

The map, while familiar, seemed very different from the one in my car. Further examination revealed that it was a 1984 road map of PEI. The ferry — “CN Marine” — was still in service. The waterfront of Charlottetown was a rail yard. CHTN was out on North River Road. And there was a detailed introduction to the metric system on the back.

It boggles my mind to consider the process by which this map was transferred, over 21 years, from car to car, remaining intact and in the right place. We must go through a dozen PEI road maps every year in our family.

Being away for a month meant coming close to missing the “15th of the month” deadline for submitting the payroll remittances for Reinvented to Revenue Canada. I couldn’t mail them in, because Revenue Canada says “the date of receipt is the date the payment is delivered to the Receiver General and not the date you mailed the payment.” Much to my surprise, I found that I could take the payment to the Metro Credit Union and Revenue Canada considers this to be “delivery” (they say “date stamped by your financial institution”).

So I made it under the wire.

Curiously, the Toronto Dominion Bank wouldn’t accept the payment, even though Revenue Canada clearly states “make your payment free of charge at your Canadian Financial Institution, in Canada, by presenting this form to the teller.” I don’t have a business account at the TD, and they wouldn’t accept my Credit Union check.

The Brackley Drive-in Theatre has opened for the season. With the new season comes a new RSS feed. Subscribe with your favourite newsreader, and you’ll always know what awaits you at the drive-in.

Here’s how the RSS feed looks in the new version of Safari:

The feed is just a test right now, and probably needs some tweaking; I welcome any feedback.

The noisy tourismocrats at the Capital Commission announced their battle plans today in their war to again sacrifice our neighbourhood to tourists interested in pummelling themselves with teenage rock. Rather than boring you with the details, I present only the superlatives therefrom:

• grand style
• remarkable
• top
• largest
• most spectacular
• envy of the nation
• significant
• best
• very important
• major
• climbing the charts
• riding the wave
• popular
• major feat
• biggest
• biggest ever
• smash hit
• exciting
• grand
• largest
• most spectacular
• significantly enhanced
• largest
• most spectacular
• amazing
• fabulous
• hit
• pulsating
• contagious
• award winning
• fabulous

Here’s a list of things I’ve noticed that happened in while we were away for a month:

• The furniture, appliance and electronics store The Brick opened in the old Sears space.
• The New Yorker received a subtle re-design, mostly concerning the design of the restaurant, record and other mini-reviews that appear up front with the listings.
• The Formosa Tea House got a new deck.
• Shawn Murphy, MP for Charlottetown, sent out a large quantity of “here’s why the Government is great” junk mail.
• There’s a new Chinese restaurant next to Monsoon.
• The new VW Jetta was released. I can’t believe how ugly it is; they totally de-Jettaed it.
• Montreal’s Trudeau (nee Dorval) airport’s international arrivals area, under heavy renovations, reached the point of total insanity. I believe we walked 4 miles between stepping off the plane from France and stepping on the plane to Charlottetown.
• There are new banners celebrating Charlottetown’s 150th birthday hanging all over the downtown. They are surprisingly un-ugly.
• Timothy’s on Kent St. serves tea in very nice integrated “teapot-cup” units. They may have been doing this all along; today was the first time I ever ordered tea there.
• Canada’s parliamentary democracy seems to have gone to hell.
• Revenue Canada has denied my appeal of a $269 penalty for turning in my payroll remittances late for February. Apparently having the flu and being unable to get out of bed is not sufficient reason.
• Spring and summer have come and gone, and winter has returned. This is, in my memory, the shortest spring/summer period ever. Good thing we didn’t put the snow shovels away.

My copy of OS X “Tiger” arrived yesterday. I’m all backed up and ready to install. Catch you on the other side.